The Vine Squeezes Advertising Juice Out of 6-Second Movie Clips

The advertising business is as vibrant as ever it was, but it is undergoing seismic changes. Foremost amongst these is a re-balancing of promotional budgets away from traditional mass media advertising towards digital. This reflects the sharply reduced audience reach of mass media and a heightened desire for the measurement and accountability that digital can offer. There is also another change afoot. This is a fundamental shift in thinking about the very nature of consumer persuasion, from explicit sales-oriented advertising to implicit branded media ‘content’, meaning blogs, news features, web pages, Tweets and statuses, movie clips, and anything else that can be shared on social media.    

Some digital platforms still haven’t embraced the content revolution, and they try to monetise their audiences by wrapping conventional advertising around their offer. To be fair, they’re doing pretty well at it. Facebook, for example, are making huge revenues with their programmatic advertising that delves into your posts and surfing history to mainline ads into your newsfeed. If you’re like me though, you’ll find these pretty irrelevant and not a little intrusive. YouTube, too, have woven advertising into their offer to make serious ad revenue from the huge visitor traffic to their site. Enterprising individuals can earn a slice of this revenue, if they buy in to the programmatic advertising ethos and aren’t too fussy about which ads are seen around their clips. Recently, it was reported that some ads were being shown around extremist Jihadist videos, which just goes to show that algorithms make poor brand consultants.

Conventional advertising on digital media pleases a lot of brand clients because they think they understand it and they can show a page of graphs to their main board detailing the Return On Investment (ROI) earned by each £1 of promotional budget. The thing is, most social media users hate it. What they, and we, prefer, is content, branded or not, that doesn’t disrupt our media experience. We want to be entertained, amused, informed, diverted, and brands have a role in that. What we don’t want, really, is to be sold at. 

  

At just eighteen months old, the Vine is a relative newcomer to the video-sharing genre of social media, but it seems to have found a way to turn site traffic water into advertising revenue wine with branded content. The video clips on The Vine are just 6 seconds long, but the formula has proved infectious. Some Vine stars have millions of followers, and advertisers want to reach that young audience. More to the point, Vine advertising tends to consist of content that is fun in its own right and happens to be sponsored, in contrast to YouTube which has to force viewers to watch conventional spot advertising before they can watch the video clip they really went there to watch.  

Vines have to be funny and authentic to be shared. Many young people are tired of the commercialisation of social media. Expensively produced content made by a team of professional marketing hacks lacks the authenticity of a short clip conceived for fun and filmed and edited on a smartphone. Followers like and trust the Vine stars and they accept sponsored content provided they can believe the star would really use that brand. So, the brands pay big money to top Vine stars to create a sketch around their brand. When the fans enjoy the content and share it, that’s called earned media, and the potential audience of millions rivals anything brands can get from traditional ‘bought’ media advertising spots, at a fraction of the cost. What is more, social media shares reflect sincere consumer engagement. Traditional advertising has to work very hard to penetrate the wall of cynicism or indifference with which it is usually greeted.

Authenticity on social media is pretty hard to find, and when it does emerge the few examples tend to be quickly embraced and thoroughly de-authenticised by the folks from Big Marketing and PR. Of course, we all still use our social media in spite of the clunky advertising, but the advertisers keep chasing the ideal of integrating promotion seamlessly with our media experience. They would like the brands to become as natural a part of our lives as, well, filming ourselves on smartphones. The Vine is still just outside the media Establishment, and that has appeal, but it probably won’t be for long. What will be the next source of authenticity in social media that the advertisers can turn to their ends?              

Vine https://vine.co/

BBC News story http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28692871 (August 13, 2014)